Today we post on our Pages (find the category in our margin) Jillian Becker’s review of The New Testament.

Here is part of it:

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The New Testament is a work of fiction, based on the life, death, and oral teaching of a Jewish hasid (pious man) who, according to its chronicles, lived between the reigns of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius.

Almost all its contents were originally composed in a demotic Greek known as koine, but it has been translated into most other languages. (Quotations in this review are taken from the King James authorized version.)

A compilation of writings by many authors, only one of whom is identifiable with any certainty, and all of whom were long dead when the anthology was first published in the late 2nd. century C.E., it is a tendentious production, its chief purpose being to support the contention of the Catholic Church that the pious man it names “Jesus”, was “God” incarnated as a human being.

Although the collection is purported to be a factual record, the documents were not selected for their quality of research, accuracy of reportage, or their credibility, but to serve this purpose. So the book is full of contradictions, and transparent distortions of known history. The strain this puts on a critical reader’s credulity is such that he must soon realize how impossible it is to distinguish any facts it might contain from the mass of obvious fabrications, though some of the contradictions give hints of truths covered up, and plausible guesses have been made by historians as to what might actually have been done and said by the characters whose existence is recorded. Some historians have used this useful formula: if a passage goes against the manifest purpose of the authors and compilers, its retention in the narrative might be because it was too well known to be omitted, and so has a higher probability of being an authentic quotation or recollection.

It would be a tedious task (and would take volumes, as it has) to point out all the contradictions, inconsistencies, and multitudinous implausibilities in the assembled documents; but some are so egregious that they may easily be spotted by an attentive reader, and few could escape a skeptic’s cold eye. … [A few examples are given.]

The Catholic Church made and published the book when it did because one of its many rival Christian Churches – led by Marcion, a rich ship-owner with a following possibly equal in size to its own – had gathered documents written in the late first and early second centuries – ten “letters of Paul” and most of the gospel of Luke – and published them in or about 140 C.E. as a testament of the faith. The Catholic Church regarded the Church of Marcion as heretical, but understood how powerful the existence of such a testament could be, and so produced its own orthodox version: the same “letters of Paul” and all four gospels at first, and a little later, around 200 C.E., more of the letters written by Paul or attributed to him, and the Acts of the Apostles, and an “Apocalypse of Peter”. It wasn’t until 367 C.E. that the twenty-seven “books” of The New Testament were recorded by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, as being as they are now, in the same order – which is not the order in which they were produced.

Marcion was a devotee of Paul, the originating author of Christianity, and like the antinomian Paul he wanted the Jewish scriptures – containing the Law which the coming of the Christ, in their conviction, had superseded – to be consigned to oblivion, and any connection between Christianity and Judaism to be buried. But the fathers of the Catholic Church came to realize that their religion could not do without that much older compilation of fictions, the Jewish bible; could not do without the moral law that it contained, which they separated from its ritualistic observances; and as Jesus was their “Christ” – that word being the Greek translation of the Hebrew “Messiah” – they needed the prophecies of the Messiah’s coming.

But Jesus, they believed, was much more than the Jewish idea of the Messiah. He was what Paul had said he was: the immortal “Son of God” born as a man “to save mankind from sin and death”. That was and is Christian doctrine. The Jews believed their Messiah would be a mortal man of great power, an anointed king who would free them from foreign subjugation and restore them, “the Children of Israel”, to independence and glory as in the days of David and Solomon. Jesus was obviously not their Messiah since he had come and gone without their being freed from Roman rule; and far from being restored to independence and glory, they lost their country, were scattered over the known world, and forever thereafter cruelly persecuted by all and sundry – especially the Christians.

How does The New Testament characterize God Incarnate as a teacher and preacher? Its portrait of Jesus places him on the sentimental side of rabbinic tradition. He is given nothing to say that was new except a mystical statement that bread is his body and wine his blood (a harking back to paganism that occurred to St. Paul as a revelation). He tells, as was the rabbinic way, fables with moral messages. Some of the messages are unintelligible (Matthew 20:16,, “So the last shall be first and the first last.”; Matthew 13:12, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath”. ) He utters no profundities – nothing comparable to numerous utterances of the Stoics, for instance – and falls far short of the intellectual stature of such rabbinic thinkers as his near contemporary Hillel and the second century Akiba. (Hillel was the gentle carpenter rabbi who turned the idealistic Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would they should do unto you”, into the far more practical rule not to do anything to any one else that you would not want done to you. That, he said, was the whole essence of the Law. Akiba’s insistence on free will – that you are always free to choose between good and evil – is a direct contradiction of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.) But Jesus’s lack of profundity is not surprising. His authors were not men with great gifts of the mind, and they could not endow him with a genius that they themselves did not possess.

To the extent that Jesus is made to vary traditional Jewish moral teaching it is to shift its stress. Where the most important value in Judaism was justice (or “righteousness”), in Christianity it is love. The mission of mankind was changed from the necessary moral task of trying to be just to all equally, to the impossibly idealistic one to love all equally. The change softened and sentimentalized the theistic idea. This was a God who suffered; a God in the form, for a time, of a dependent infant; a God who forgave without limit. Most of the authors wanted to present him as a preacher of peace, though this aim is undermined by his saying (Matthew 10:34) “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” – one of the statements that may be genuine precisely because it does not accord with the intentions of the Church. And one of the great inconsistencies of the new doctrine is that this forgiving, pacific, loving, merciful God, contrasting himself to the vengeful God of the Jews, will yet be the ultimate judge of everyman, and condemn sinners to the eternal anguish of a Hell more terrible than anything Judaism had envisaged.

All in all, there is little to recommend this book in itself: it testifies to absurdities; much of it (especially the Epistles and The Acts) is pedantic and tedious; it prescribes behavior contrary to human nature and yet declares failure punishable by an eternity of agony; and it provides no important insights. It lacks, or has very little good poetry (just one chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, is a fine poem, and certainly not written by the pedantic St. Paul to whom it is ascribed!), the quantity and excellence of which is the redeeming feature of the so-called Old Testament. Its most impressive part, if judged as a work of literature, is Revelation, which seems to have been inspired directly by the vivid fantasies of the Old Testament’s book of Daniel.

But – mirabile dictu – it has had, and continues to have, an immense effect in the real world. Millions still believe its narratives to be true and its teaching to be superlatively good. Untold numbers have died in the last nineteen hundred years defending interpretations of its messages. It has contributed importantly to the culture of the West, and not only the West. Whether its contribution has been more enriching than detrimental remains a matter of controversy, but either way it cannot be ignored, and should be read by all who would count themselves educated.

But then again, you hardly need to read it if you live in the Western world. You cannot easily escape it. It is with us whether we like it or not.

Posted under Christianity by Jillian Becker on Sunday, August 21, 2016

A university is no longer a place of free speech where, among other scholars, and under the guidance of the erudite, you gain knowledge, learn to think, acquire skills through the training of your brain and in some disciplines your hands, so you can make a contribution to the world and be rewarded with the wherewithal to live a good life. No.

It is a place you pay a vast sum of money to attend in order to shiver and quake and weep, and gnash your teeth, and shriek at your instructors, and parade your weaknesses with pride and your color with arrogance or apology depending on what it is: white with apology, other with arrogance.

Is it worth paying that vast sum of money just to perform acts of desperate suffering, shrink away in specially protected corners, crow over others or be crowed over?

Well, maybe the crowing over others is good fun. But at such expense? Couldn’t you do it back home, now and then, for nothing?

When it comes to choosing illustrations of terror-and-grief performances and speech censorship at universities, we have an embarrassment of riches. But they are hardly needed. Everyone who watches TV and scans a newspaper on line has surely seen the screaming acts on campuses, the invasions of quiet libraries by noisy aggressive mobs, the wild attacks in lecture halls on persons non grata, and read about the revisions of the English language by which deranged administrators struggle to ameliorate the noisy sorrow of the “students”.

Here are a few items of university news cited by John Hawkins at Townhall:

“Vote Trump” Written In Chalk On The Sidewalks Of College Campuses

We’ve now reached the point where liberal students have become so sheltered that merely seeing support for a candidate that they don’t like sends them into a tizzy.

Just hours before four bombs ripped apart two transportation systems in Europe, Emory students were dealing with their own supposed terror situation. … Someone had the audacity to scribble “Trump 2016″, “Vote Trump”, and “Trump!!!” with a writing utensil preferred by toddlers. The erasable chalk around the campus, with a simple political message, was all it took for these easily offended people to completely lose it, suffering emotional unrest that officials were forced to deal with.

The campus publication, The Emory Wheel, actually took this “chalk situation” seriously, seemingly siding with the crybaby college students who demanded to know how someone could rape their “safe space” with a candidate’s last name. Rather than walking over the words, or simply wiping away the words instead of their tears, 40 students banded together to protest this sidewalk “terrorism” inside the administration building.

“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe here,” one female student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it [sic] as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

Calling America “A Land of Opportunity”

The University of California sent a handout to faculty recently that includes a list of offensive statements. According to the handout, “America is the land of opportunity” will be banned from campus. … A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression.

According to the handout, called Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send, the statement asserts that race and gender do not play a role in life successes — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions.

Other microaggressions listed on the document include asking, ‘Where are you from or where were you born?” (because it suggests that the person you’re asking is “not a true American”); asking a post-doctoral minority student whether he or she is lost in the halls of a chemistry building (because it “makes the assumption that the person is trying to break into one of the labs”); and having students fill out forms on which they have to check a box indicating whether they’re male or female.

The school will now ban the phrase, “America is the land of opportunity”.

The Word “Man” Being Too Much For Students At Princeton

The Princeton University HR department has largely wiped the word “man” from its vocabulary.

The relatively new policy in effect at the Ivy League institution spells out the directive in a four-page memo that aims to make the department more gender inclusive.

Instead of using “man”, employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.

The memo goes on to list a variety of occupations that typically include the word “man” in them and offers replacements: business person instead of businessman, firefighter instead of fireman, ancestors instead of forefathers, and so on.

In a statement to The College Fix, John Cramer, Princeton’s director of media relations, said the guidelines “reflect the university’s initiative of fostering an inclusive environment”.

Princeton’s LGBT Center also offers a guide on various gender pronouns for those who identify as “transgender, genderqueer, and other gender-variant”, suggesting “ze, zie and hir”, “they and theirs’, and “Ey, em, eir and emself”.

The Name “Lynch”

Students are demanding that … Lebanon Valley College administrators remove or modify the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” — not because the man it was named after was a racist, but because these students cannot handle the word “lynch”. Lynch, of course, is a term that means to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction.

The hall was named after Clyde A. Lynch, who served as president of the college during the Great Depression and raised more than $500,000 for the physical education building that bears his name.

Just a few urgent changes in the process of totally transforming the land of the free and the home of the brave into a country safe for crybullies and ignoramuses.

In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment, for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christianity.

Today offensive words against Islam is a crime in Britain and most of the countries of the European Union.

Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey, two persons, on two separate occasions, were rejected as jurymen, and one of them grossly insulted by the judge and by one of the counsel, because they honestly declared that they had no theological belief; and a third, a foreigner, for the same reason, was denied justice against a thief.

This refusal of redress took place in virtue of the legal doctrine, that no person can be allowed to give evidence in a court of justice, who does not profess belief in a God (any god is sufficient) and in a future state ,,,

Meaning an afterlife in a Christian heaven or hell …

… which is equivalent to declaring such persons to be outlaws, excluded from the protection of the tribunals; who may not only be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if no one but themselves, or persons of similar opinions, be present, but any one else may be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if the proof of the fact depends on their evidence.

The assumption on which this is grounded, is that the oath is worthless, of a person who does not believe in a future state; a proposition which betokens much ignorance of history in those who assent to it (since it is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor); and would be maintained by no one who had the smallest conception how many of the persons in greatest repute with the world, both for virtues and for attainments, are well known, at least to their intimates, to be unbelievers.

The rule, besides, is suicidal, and cuts away its own foundation. Under pretense that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.

A rule thus self-convicted of absurdity so far as regards its professed purpose, can be kept in force only as a badge of hatred, a relic of persecution; a persecution, too, having the peculiarity, that the qualification for undergoing it, is the being clearly proved not to deserve it. The rule, and the theory it implies, are hardly less insulting to believers than to infidels. For if he who does not believe in a future state, necessarily lies, it follows that they who do believe are only prevented from lying, if prevented they are, by the fear of hell.

The quotation comes from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, first published in 1869.

New curbs on free speech (see the post immediately below) are taking the people of the West in the 21st century back to the 19th century.

Will the unaccountable passion among Western rulers and legislators for protecting the appalling ideology of Islam from criticism, take us all the way back to the time of Calvin’s Geneva and the Catholic Inquisition?

London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, is allocating over two million dollars (£1,730,726) to an “online hate crime hub” enabling police to track and arrest “trolls” who “target … individuals and communities”. There can be no doubt, given the nature of the British political establishment today, which “trolls” these new Thought Police will be going after, and which “communities” will be protected from “hate speech”. “Islamophobia”, which David Horowitz and I termed “the thought crime of the totalitarian future”, is now going to bring down upon the hapless “trolls” the wrath of London’s Metropolitan police force – and this totalitarian new initiative shows yet again how easily the Leftist and Islamic supremacist agendas coincide and aid each other.

“The Metropolitan police service,” said a police spokesman, “is committed to working with our partners, including the mayor, to tackle all types of hate crime including offenses committed online.” Given the fact that Khan … has numerous questionable ties to Islamic supremacists, it is unlikely that he will be particularly concerned about “hate speech” by jihad preachers (several of whom were just recently welcomed into a Britain that has banned foes of jihad, including me).

And the “partners” of the London police are likely to include Tell Mama UK, which says on its website: “We work with Central Government to raise the issues of anti-Muslim hatred at a policy level and our work helps to shape and inform policy makers, whilst ensuring that an insight is brought into this area of work through the systematic recording and reporting of anti-Muslim hate incidents and crimes.” Tell Mama UK has previously been caught classifying as “anti-Muslim hate incidents and crimes”, speech on Facebook and Twitter that it disliked. Now it will have the help of the London police to do that.

“The purpose of this program,” we’re told, “is to strengthen the police and community response to this growing crime type.” This “crime type” is only “growing” because Britain has discarded the principle of the freedom of speech, and is committing itself increasingly to the idea that “hate speech” is objectively identifiable, and should be restricted by government and law enforcement action. …

Behind the push for “hate speech” laws is, of course, the increasingly authoritarian Left. Increasingly unwilling (and doubtless unable) to engage its foes in rational discussion and debate, the Left is resorting more and more to the Alinskyite tactic of responding to conservatives only with ridicule and attempts to rule conservative views out of the realm of acceptable discourse. That coincides perfectly with the ongoing initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to intimidate the West into criminalizing criticism of Islam.

The excuse Sadiq Khan used for setting up thought policing was a mythical racist “hate surge” concocted by the Left.

The London Mayor wasted no time in trying to link the supposed racial hate surge with the referendum:

You can’t escape the conclusion that there is a link between the referendum and a surge in racial incidents.

During the referendum campaign he had attempted to tar the Leave campaign with the phrase “project hate” …

The wannabe first Muslim Prime Minister of the UK is now seizing his opportunity to set up an Orwellian specialized thought police unit to censor the internet …

For which he needs the co-operation of – or “partnership with” – social media firms, such a Facebook and Twitter.

How did the “conservative” British government react?

As you can imagine our new UK home secretary Amber Rudd, far from trying to damp down the surge in wild exaggeration by our stupid media, jumped on the bandwagon instead and announced a plan to tackle “hate crime”:

She was quoted [by the Independent newspaper] as saying:

Hatred does not get a seat at the table, and we will do everything we can to stamp it out.

You can’t “stamp out” hatred home secretary. Hatred is thought, you can’t “stamp out” what goes on in people’s minds. …

The BBC could be trusted to share the point of view of the Left and the Muslim mayor – and the so-called conservative government:

In the BBC news website [an] article began with this sensational announcement in bold letters:

More than 6,000 hate crimes have been reported to police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the wake of the EU referendum, figures show.

By using the phrase “in the wake of the EU referendum”, the wording here is clearly designed to sensationally suggest that the 6,000 hate incidents are somehow related to the EU referendum. In fact the figure of 6,000 was just the TOTAL number of reported “hate incidents” in the UK for the month. The article then reveals that this figure was only around 30% higher than the same period in the previous year. So even if you take these figures blindly at face value, then the most you could sensibly claim is that 1,800 reported “hate incidents” were somehow POSSIBLY (not NECESSARILY) related to the EU referendum campaign. Furthermore the quoted figures were for a whole month, they were not restricted to the immediate period around the referendum. …

There have been changes in the way “hate incidents” are reported … There had also been an 18% increase in 2015 over the previous year, which was probably due to the fact that the public are being encouraged to report more of these “hate incidents”. …

Some of the reported incidents may have been entirely made up for all we know, many others may well not have qualified as crime at all. It also seems very strange to me that mere “verbal abuse” should be included in a category of “violence against the person”.

The [BBC] article overall contains two videos which both describe particular alleged racist incidents. This helps to build a subliminal impression that the figures related to racist “hate incidents” alone. However there is NO BREAKDOWN of the figures to reveal the more specific nature of the incidents, for example if there was a surge in racism which races were involved.

In summary then the very worst case is that 1,800 extra “hate incidents” were reported in the whole month period. So, out of a UK total population of 65.1 million (at least) then less than 0.003% (or about 1 in every 35,000 people) felt the need to report such an incident to the police in this month over and above incidents reported last year. Also, bear in mind that these included as “hate incidents” behaviour as minor as verbal abuse (one estimate put these at 76% of the reported incidents). For all we know most of these incidents might have been cases of verbal abuse aimed at Leave campaigners. …

I think its fairly safe to say that any actual increase in hate that genuinely can be attributed to the referendum campaign did not by any means all come from the Leave side of the argument. Ironically one of the “hate criminals” revealed in this article is one Noel Fielding, a “comedian” who regularly appears on BBC TV, who apparently had “joked” in 2015:

Don’t applaud Farage, stab him.

But needless to say, he will not be prosecuted for a “hate crime”.

Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton clarified that while reporting of hate crimes had risen via an online form, there was no evidence to suggest that this was uniquely related to a Brexit vote, nor that the crimes have actually been committed. …

To summarize, the media have attempted to smear the Brexit referendum result as creating a significantly increased climate of racial hatred on the basis of no evidence at all. Our political leaders have hastily responded to the non-event.

So first the Left invented “hate speech”. Then they invented “hate crime”. Then Islam, in the person of the incredibly elected mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, set up Thought Police to stop anyone making any criticism of the appalling ideology of Islam. And finally, the British “conservative” – and apparently now heavily feminist – government endorsed the entire movement.

If only all the people who voted to leave the EU really would make war on their enemies!

Which sigh from our heart the London Thought Police would treat as a “hate crime”.

For a little while yet we may still write such things on a website in America.

Ken Salazar, President Obama’s disgraced ex-interior secretary and former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton’s White House transition chair on Monday.

The pick confirms that a Clinton presidency would not only be Barack Obama’s third term ideologically, but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption.

Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama’s interior secretary in 2013 “to spend time with family”, Salazar threatened violence against a local Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon hat-wearing bureaucrat’s cronyism-tainted deals.

At issue: How rancher and reported Salazar business associate Tom Davis profited handsomely from the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. Not long after Salazar took office, Davis paid $10 each for more than 1,700 federally protected horses who roamed on public lands. He then turned around and sold them for slaughter near the Mexican border for $154,000, despite signing a contract prohibiting him from doing so.

When Gazette reporter David Phillips (now at The New York Times) asked about the controversy at an Obama election night event in November 2012, Salazar snapped:

“You know what, never do that. This is a — this is the Obama — You know what, if you do that to me again, I’m going to punch you out. OK? Don’t ever, ever, from the Gazette or anybody else do that to me again. Set me up. You know?”

Caught on tape by Philipps and another witness, Knuckles Salazar issued an “apology”. But neither he nor Davis, who said he had previously hauled cattle for Salazar for years, ever answered for their actions. An Inspector General determined Salazar’s department “failed to follow its own policy of limiting horse sales and ensuring that the horses sold went to good homes and were not slaughtered”. No penalties, no prosecution, no nothing.

Ken Salazar is a liar. He trampled the rule of law, defied court orders, and doctored scientific conclusions in the name of environmental protection. Have you forgotten? After the BP oil spill in 2010, the Obama White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater drilling industry. The sweeping ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The order was supposedly based on recommendations from an expert oil spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out Obama’s environmental team for misleading the public about the scientific evidence … Salazar and eco czar Carol Browner oversaw the false rewriting of the drilling ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Feldman singled out the Salazar-run agency’s culture of contempt and serial “determined disregard” for the law.

“Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness,” Feldman wrote, Salazar’s doctored report was “misleading” and the experts who wrote it called it a “‘misrepresentation’. It was factually incorrect.” Once again, Salazar evaded accountability despite continued obstruction and repeated refusal to cooperate with nearly 50 public records requests from Congress regarding his post-BP spill decisions.

Ken Salazar hates American consumers and workers. He infamously told the Senate in 2008 that he would refuse emergency drilling requests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge even if gas prices reached $10 a gallon. He arbitrarily pulled nearly 100 oil leases in Utah – costing the state thousands of jobs – based on bogus eco-claims that were refuted by the Interior Department’s own inspector general. Offshore and onshore, Salazar waged war relentlessly on the energy sector and the American West.

Ken Salazar is a job-killing, truth-sabotaging, law-skirting, media-bullying corruptocrat who just won’t let go of power.

In other words: a perfect headhunter for America’s Evita Peron.

Hillary Clinton has also been called America’s Angela Merkel – notably by Donald Trump – because like the German Chancellor, she wants to import millions of Muslims from the Middle East.

But we think that of all infamous women, Hillary Clinton most resembles Winnie Mandela. She became untouchable by the law because she was the wife of a powerful politician – and has gotten away with murder.

According to many polls at this moment, most voters want Hillary Clinton to be president.

Most voters, then, are choosing corruption.

The Clintons are powerful. They are above the law. In cahoots with Obama and his gang, they have corrupted the US State Department, the US Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

And it doesn’t stop there. Is there a government agency that has not been corrupted?

As we have touched on environmental protection, let’s look at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The senior Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official who scammed the agency out of nearly $1 million in pay without working, got service and salary awards throughout his lengthy career as a climate policy expert, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch.

His name is John Beale and he’s on the verge of completing a 32-month prison sentence for defrauding the government by claiming, while employed at the EPA, to be a “secret agent” for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and going on long vacations that he said were CIA missions.

While he committed the fraud the EPA regularly rewarded him with “Special Act or Service Awards” that included cash and time off … From 1991 through 1998 Beale received thousands of dollars in bonuses for his performance as well as a “Time Off Award” in 1998 … In 2001 he was rewarded yet again with a promotion to work at the White House as a “Senior Policy Advisor”. …

He was a senior level official who actually worked in the agency’s most powerful office, Air and Radiation (OAR), under President Obama’s current EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy.

OAR is feared by American companies because it develops polices and regulations associated with climate change air pollution that can impose huge costs to both consumers and businesses. McCarthy headed OAR from 2008 to 2013 when Beale was a high-ranking senior policy adviser, which means the EPA Administrator directly managed him at the time.

Beale also defrauded the agency by receiving unlawful reimbursements for upscale personal travel, claiming to be away working for the CIA for 2 ½ years while he collected EPA paychecks and continuing to collect his full government salary years after officially retiring from the agency.

A U.S. Senate investigation blasted McCarthy, his boss at the time at OAR, for not taking action for months after learning that Beale committed fraud. “On March 29, 2012, an OAR official raised concerns about Beale’s retirement when he informed McCarthy that Beale was still on payroll,” the Senate report states. “Despite being aware of the fact that one of her subordinates was collecting a paycheck without providing any work product, this arrangement continued for seven more months before McCarthy ever contacted Beale.” In December 2012, McCarthy met with Beale for the first time in nearly 15 months and he told her he was no longer planning to retire. Beale wasn’t reported to the EPA Inspector General for another two months and, though McCarthy had cause to fire him, she let him retire voluntarily with full benefits. Remember, this is the woman who runs the agency now.

On August 23, 2013, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed criminal charges against Beale and a year later he was convicted of fraud and stealing $900,000 from the government. He’s on the verge of completing a 32-month sentence in a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland. The Senate investigation determined that his actions, not only disgraced the agency, but also raised questions about its management and oversight abilities. In fact, despite Beale’s decades-long history of fraud and deceit many of his EPA colleagues refuse to view him as a criminal and even submitted letters to the court requesting leniency during his sentencing. “These officials’ reaction to the scandal suggests that an individual can steal a million dollars from taxpayers and perpetrate a crime for nearly two decades, but still be considered — by some — as an environmental legend,” the Senate report states.

Such people are apparently preferred by more than half the nation to a man who does not express himself with precision. And whose taste is considered vulgar. Indeed, what is mere corruption compared to such faults?

Yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio, Donald Trump delivered the best speech of his campaign to date. Newt Gingrich rightly called it the most important since Ronald Reagan left office.

In fact, in many ways, it was very Reaganesque. After all, long before he became president, Mr. Reagan warned that every generation faces an existential threat to freedom. Mr. Trump made clear that he recognizes the threat to freedom in our time, which he explicitly characterized as “Radical Islam” and its guiding, supremacist ideology, Sharia.

The GOP nominee also channeled President Reagan by espousing a comprehensive strategy highly reminiscent of the one the Gipper formally adopted in his National Security Decision Directive 75 and employed to defeat freedom’s last existential threat: Soviet communism. Mr. Trump recognizes that now, as then, we must bring decisively to bear all instruments of national power – economic, military, intelligence, information and ideological.

The last element, which was emphasized repeatedly in the Trump speech, reflects an essential understanding that has eluded past administrations of both parties and some of the candidate’s most vociferous critics, Democrats and Republicans alike: Jihadists who seek the destruction of our country, its Constitution, and people employ different tactics – including violence, migration, material support for terrorism, recruitment, indoctrination, conversions and stealthy subversion. But they are all motivated by the same ideology: Sharia. Donald Trump declared yesterday that if you embrace that supremacist doctrine, you must seek to supplant our Constitution and, therefore, you are not welcome here.

Specifically, the speech adopted a basic principle: As a foreign national and would-be immigrant to this country, you must share our values to gain admission. That filter has for too long been absent and has greatly contributed to the ominous demographic trends facing not just Europe, but this country, as well: growing numbers of transplanted and inherently hostile populations, most of whom have no interest in assimilating and, rather, insist that freedom-loving Americans accommodate their demands and, ultimately, submit to Sharia.

Finally, the Republican candidate to be our next Commander-in-Chief spoke of a reality that can no longer safely be ignored: There are “networks” in America that support “radicalization”. In so doing, he recognized another hard lesson from Europe’s experience. Violent jihadists rely upon and exploit the infrastructure (including Islamist mosques, societies, cultural centers, front groups, influence operations, etc.) that has been systematically put into place in the West over the past fifty years by Islamic supremacists, notably those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. …

Much encouraged by President Obama, who has numerous Muslim Brothers advising his administration – to what ends we have seen in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya …

We have no choice but to identify, designate and roll-up such operations. …

At no point since 9/11, and arguably for thirteen years before, has there been a better articulation of what’s at stake and what needs to be done to secure freedom, namely by seeking and achieving Victory over Jihad. We desperately need more such visionary and collaborative leadership.

The other candidate for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, wants to import many more Syrians – that is, many more devotees of Sharia – into the US. (According to Politifact, 550% more.) She is being massively helped to achieve her aims with funds by billionaires who do not understand that they, along with all non-Muslims, will be the victims of her pro-Islam policy.

A massive hack of socialist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations suggests that his various nonprofit organizations are little more than fronts for his many political activities. His growing closeness to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should be a warning to all.

The hack by a group called DC Leaks, includes 2,576 files from various Soros groups from 2008 to 2016. The DC Leaks website says the attack was “launched by American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people.”

Apart from the ease with which the Soros group’s computer system was breached, what we’re learning so far fills in the troubling details of how Soros goes about his business. No doubt, in coming days, more revelations will emerge as researchers comb through the thousands of documents.

But what’s emerged so far is eye-opening. In one of the purloined memos from 2011, titled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civil Discourse”, a nonprofit Soros group proposes conducting opposition research on a number of highly prominent American critics of radical Islam, including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer. It also targeted conservative activists and intellectuals David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney. All of them are strongly pro-Israel and have warned about the threat of radical Islam.

The memo suggests that the research was outsourced to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a leftist think tank that has “received millions of dollars in grants from Soros’s groups”…

Oh yes, CAP also happens to have been founded by John Podesta, Hillary’ Clinton’s campaign chief. One of many close ties between Soros and Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post notes that some of the hacked emails show that the Soros Open Society Foundations’ stated goal was “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies,” in part by “questioning Israel’s reputation as a democracy”. This is an old Soros trick: He spends money to delegitimize governments and others with whom he disagrees. It’s not about debate, and certainly not “open”, as his groups’ names all suggest. It’s political subterfuge in service of a far-left agenda.

So remember the next time Hillary postures as a pro-Israel Democrat – her campaign has ties to groups that actively undercut the Jewish state, our only real ally in the Mideast.

But it goes well beyond just Israel. In yet another revelation from the doc-dump, a memo called the “List of European Elections 2014 Projects” details the elaborate efforts of Soros’ well-funded global network to manipulate election outcomes in Europe. The memo includes over 90 Soros projects in Europe to influence election outcomes. Now, through Hillary, he wants to do the same here. And Soros has the clout. …

Happily, he does not always succeed. He tried to influence the British referendum on withdrawal from the European Union, hoping to keep Britain in that corrupt bureaucratic dictatorship, and he failed.

Fox News reports that Soros has given an estimated $9 million to Hillary-favoring super PACS in 2015 and 2016, more than anyone else. But he’s not Hillary’s only billionaire. Not by a long shot. “Within the past year,” Fox News reported earlier this month, “a total of 24 billionaires have donated more than $42.5 million to two Clinton campaign arms and three allied super PACs”.

So while Soros and other billionaires fund Clinton’s campaign and other left-wing causes, the Clinton Family Foundation focuses on extending the Clintons’ political clout both here and abroad by trading political access for cash. The Clintons have together pulled in more than $240 million since leaving the White House “dead broke”, as Hillary once put it. Now the Clinton Foundation reportedly is under federal investigation for its questionable fundraising practices.

“It’s a way, effectively, to get around those campaign laws,” noted Peter Schweizer, author of the extensively documented book Clinton Cash, in a recent interview. “Hillary Clinton running for president in 2008, if you’re a foreign oligarch, you can’t give to her campaign, but you can have Bill Clinton give a 20-minute speech for half a million dollars, or you can make a $5 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, and you’ve got access every bit as much as if you had raised money for their political campaign. That’s really what the Clintons have done.”

As the saying goes, between the fire and the fire engine you cannot be neutral.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump talked about China and the bad trade deals that Congress has made with foreign countries to the detriment of our nation. It flew by the ears of most people unless they were directly involved or victims of such bad trade deals like NAFTA.

On November 5, 2015, our government released the full 6,000-page document of Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, a proposed 12-nation trade deal which is skimpy on trade and large on giving away our manufacturing sector to the third world.

Seeking to establish one huge market, similar to the failed EU, TPP proposes to eliminate tariffs and other barriers to goods and services, trade, and investment, production and supply chains among TPP members, creating jobs in places other than U.S., raising the third world’s living standards by transfer of wealth, and increase welfare in third world nations. The tariff schedule includes “all goods”, about “11,000 tariff lines” and “all service sectors”.

Investments will be made via TPP in digital economy, green technology, commercial relations, and capacity building assistance in needy countries (more wealth transfer from the U.S.). Little or no customs control will release goods immediately. Cross-border services will be supplied electronically. Digital E-commerce, environment, and custom duties are also addressed.

Under environment heading, marine fisheries, conservation issues, biodiversity, invasive alien species, climate change, and environmental goods and services are discussed. This document seems more about every facet of the economy and much less about trade.

If Congress has not read the 2,700-page Affordable Care Act before passing it in secret, in the dead of night, they certainly will not read this monstrous 6,000-page TPP proposed trade bill. …

She quotes a commentator we don’t know, who, she thinks, gets it right:

According to A. J. Cameron, “free trade is euphemism for moving jobs out of the U.S. with the intention of destroying the U.S. economy, in order to bring us into the One World Government fold. NAFTA and GATT were just warm-ups for TPP.” The concept of free trade is just a ruse to facilitate the redistribution of jobs to other countries. The U.S. loses because “free trade stifles employment and wage growth,” forcing more Americans to depend on government for daily subsistence. Cameron believes that “the corporate tax rate is artificially high to provide cover for globalists to offshore operations and jobs. They have created a problem and designed a solution that only profits them.”

China is not part of this “treaty” they call “partnership”. But there is a provision for a non-member nation to request membership into this “slush fund” for the corporatist elites.

Whether this profound crisis across the globe will motivate citizens to save the comatose patient called USA remains to be seen.

The experimental global change to de-nationalize, to devolve us into multi-nation “partnerships” in the name of free trade, and the fundamental transformation of western societies will have deep and long-lasting consequences for generations to come.

If TPP is a step by the international Left and anti-nation-state crony capitalists towards establishing World Government, it needs to be strenuously resisted.

Let’s take a look at Hillary’s America. How it will be. Just a glimpse, an outline. A rough guide to the Hillarian Tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter what Hillary says she will do. She is a liar. What we have to look at is the agenda of the Left. That tells us what she will do.

These are the objectives. They will not all come about at once, most will take time. But she will have time. Once she has power, she will not relinquish it. Hillary-ism will be entrenched. Her successors will be as she is. The age of the Hillarys looms ahead.

Republicans who say they will do nothing to stop her coming to power, or will even vote for her because they despise Donald Trump, speak of “the Republican brand”. They think they can endure 4 or 8 years of Hillary’s presidency, and then one of their noble breed will replace her and implement what they believe to be true Republicanism. That will not happen. Hillary will not allow it to happen. Hillary and Hillary-ists will be in to stay. There may not even be any more elections. Or if there are, the candidates will all be on the Left. In 2020 you will be able to choose from a list of Democrats. After that, the reigning Hillary alone will choose her politburo.

The Left wants to destroy Republicanism. Anything said in defense of Republican ideas – individual freedom, America-the-melting-pot, small government, low taxes, strong military, free market, secure borders – will be called “hate speech”. And the First Amendment will be amended to except “hate speech” – shortly before the Constitution is discarded altogether as an outdated and immoral document.

To come to specifics:

Education. The schools will raise the generations to be Social Justice Warriors on the right side of history. Everyone will go to a university. The universities will groom the Hillarians of the future. The students will chose their own courses. No one will ever fail.

Health. There will be a full national health service, with the state as single payer. Private insurance and private medical practice will not be permitted. Indeed, private medical practice will be criminalized. What treatment you may have will be decided by committees – appointed by the Hillarys – according to your age and your actual and potential usefulness to the community.

Money. Starting with much higher taxes and total confiscation of all assets on death, there will be a transformation of the economy until all money will belong to the state. You will receive an income judged to be sufficient to supply your needs, as defined by the state. The Left argues that it now no longer needs the signals that a market economy provided; it is possible to computerize demand and so adjust supply centrally. No one (except the Hillary in power and her aides) will be allowed to “hoard” money (what used to be called saving). You will have no extra money to use for developing your own ideas. Innovation will be ended. Pursuing real science will be impossible because …

Global warming will be the only “science”, and the threat of it will be held over your head as a perpetual terror – the equivalent of Christian Hell – so you will do whatever the Hillarys say you must do to “cut down your carbon footprint”.

Energy will be provided by wind, sun and seawaves only. It will be intermittent and extremely expensive. Such pocket money as the state will allow you will not be sufficient to provide you with warmth in winter or coolness in summer. But you will not, in any case, have your own home to heat or cool.

Agenda 21 will be fully implemented. You will occupy a unit of measured space deemed by the Hillarys to be adequate for your needs. You will be allowed to ride a bicycle, but not own a car. You will have to depend on public transport. But you will not have to travel far to your work – which will be assigned to you. Your living quarters will be conveniently close. Moving out of your district will require a permit.

There will be no more police. Only the Community Watch. Its business will be to enforce conformity.

The people in charge will be chosen not for their qualifications but for their ethnicity and gender. White men have been privileged for too long. It is time they were demoted and given only the most menial jobs.

There will no longer be a principle of equality before the law. The idea of objective judgment will be abandoned. Evidence will not be considered important. Judges will judge according to their feelings about a defendant’s “narrative”. If he/she/other belongs to a class or race that has been subordinate in the past to white male domination, he/she/other will not be held culpable for what used to be called crimes.

Reproduction will be licensed. If you fall pregnant without a license to reproduce, your embryo will be aborted. Many will be sterilized, because the world population needs to be reduced to save the planet. If you are allowed to have a child, a committee will decide its sex. It can change its sex to anything it wants once it is old enough to choose. It will be taken from you as soon as it can walk and talk, to be brought up by the community.

The country will have completely open borders. The Hillary will work with like-minded leaders of other countries towards a borderless world. World government is the ultimate objective. Then the whole world will be run on the lines outlined here for America. Certain states (Israel) will be wiped off the map.

The only change to this regime will come about when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over. They could simply buy America from this first Hillary in the near future. But they are more likely to wait for a few generations until world government is established. Then the law will be sharia universally. A description of what life will be like under sharia is not needed. The model is already in place as the caliphate of ISIS.

Posted under Uncategorized by Jillian Becker on Friday, August 12, 2016